As a core concept in the study of grammar,morphology plays an important role in word classification.This paper reviews the diachronic changes in the connotation and denotation of the term morphology in present European and American classical linguistic literature and clarifies the two different origins for the term xingtai(形态)used by traditional mainstream Chinese linguists,namely European Classical Morphological Typology and American Structural Linguistics.These two origins,to a certain extent,have resulted in Chinese linguists'different understandings of the term morphology.Given the isolating property of Chinese,with traditional morphology or xingtai,it's rather difficult to either classify Chinese words or understand Chinese syntactic relations(word classes serve as one fundamental concept in syntactic analysis).The concept of generalized morphology proposed by Fang Guangtao is essentially consistent with Zhu Dexi's idea that the essence of morphology is grammatical function.Based on previous studies,this paper revises the connotation and denotation of the broad-sense morphology,which includes the Chinese functional bound morphemes and the distinguishing features of Chinese syntactic distribution,of which the former are well functioning in both lexical and syntactical levels.We're hopeful that the broad-sense morphology may help with Chinese word classification as well as other related grammatical issues.
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